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09-26-2006, 01:03 AM
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2006/09/two_terror_case.html
Two terror cases expose Bush's double standard
By DeWayne Wickham
Four months after President Bush accused Syria of harboring terrorist camps and organizations in June 2002, U.S. authorities secretly handed over to the Damascus regime a man suspected of having ties to a terrorist group.
The awful story of what happened to Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, at the hands of Syria's secret police has received a lot of attention since it broke last week. But the troubling contradictions between what the Bush administration says and what it does in its war on terror have not.
"Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them," Bush proclaimed in his address to a joint session of Congress nine days after the 9/11 attacks on this country. "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."
But a year later, when Arar was picked up in a New York airport on a tip from Canadian police that he might have terrorist ties, he was detained briefly in this country before being sent to Syria. There, Arar says, he was beaten with a metal cable until he falsely confessed to spending time in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan and he was kept in a coffin-size dungeon cell for 10 months.
In sending Arar — whom a Canadian government commission recently cleared of any terrorist ties — to Syria, the Bush administration had good reason to know he would be brutalized.
"Although torture occurs in prisons, torture is most likely to occur while detainees are being held at one of the many detention centers run by the various security services throughout the country, and particularly while the authorities are attempting to extract a confession or information regarding an alleged crime or alleged accomplices," the State Department said of Syria in its 2001 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
If this doesn't cause you to wonder how committed the Bush administration is to its worldwide war against terrorism, there's more.
While the flimsiest of evidence caused U.S. officials to hustle Arar off to Syria, a mountain of suspicion about Luis Posada Carriles' involvement in a long list of terrorist acts has not been enough to wrench him out of this country's grip.
Posada is on the lam from Venezuela, where he was awaiting a retrial of charges that he had a hand in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. The Cuban exile denies involvement in that heinous crime, but former counterterrorism specialist Carter Cornick said Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in the bombing, The New York Times reported last year.
The newspaper also reported that Posada once bragged of masterminding a series of bombings of tourist hotels in Cuba in the 1990s, an admission he later recanted. An Italian tourist died in one of those blasts.
But instead of spiriting Posada off to Venezuela, the Bush administration is holding him in an immigration detention center. Rather than accuse him of being a terrorist, it simply has charged him with entering this country illegally.
Last year, an immigration judge ruled that Posada couldn't be deported to Venezuela or Cuba — countries the Bush administration considers rogue states — because he might be tortured. During an appearance on Telemundo, a Spanish-language TV station, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked whether this decision might affect the world's perception of the Bush administration's worldwide war on terrorism. "We try and intend to apply our standards uniformly, consistently," she said, "but these are issues that have to be decided in the right channels."
In fact, the Bush administration has contradictory standards — one for people who are thought to be enemies of this country, such as Arar, and another for Posada, an accused terrorist, who is the enemy of its enemies.
DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.
Two terror cases expose Bush's double standard
By DeWayne Wickham
Four months after President Bush accused Syria of harboring terrorist camps and organizations in June 2002, U.S. authorities secretly handed over to the Damascus regime a man suspected of having ties to a terrorist group.
The awful story of what happened to Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, at the hands of Syria's secret police has received a lot of attention since it broke last week. But the troubling contradictions between what the Bush administration says and what it does in its war on terror have not.
"Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them," Bush proclaimed in his address to a joint session of Congress nine days after the 9/11 attacks on this country. "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."
But a year later, when Arar was picked up in a New York airport on a tip from Canadian police that he might have terrorist ties, he was detained briefly in this country before being sent to Syria. There, Arar says, he was beaten with a metal cable until he falsely confessed to spending time in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan and he was kept in a coffin-size dungeon cell for 10 months.
In sending Arar — whom a Canadian government commission recently cleared of any terrorist ties — to Syria, the Bush administration had good reason to know he would be brutalized.
"Although torture occurs in prisons, torture is most likely to occur while detainees are being held at one of the many detention centers run by the various security services throughout the country, and particularly while the authorities are attempting to extract a confession or information regarding an alleged crime or alleged accomplices," the State Department said of Syria in its 2001 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices.
If this doesn't cause you to wonder how committed the Bush administration is to its worldwide war against terrorism, there's more.
While the flimsiest of evidence caused U.S. officials to hustle Arar off to Syria, a mountain of suspicion about Luis Posada Carriles' involvement in a long list of terrorist acts has not been enough to wrench him out of this country's grip.
Posada is on the lam from Venezuela, where he was awaiting a retrial of charges that he had a hand in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. The Cuban exile denies involvement in that heinous crime, but former counterterrorism specialist Carter Cornick said Posada was "up to his eyeballs" in the bombing, The New York Times reported last year.
The newspaper also reported that Posada once bragged of masterminding a series of bombings of tourist hotels in Cuba in the 1990s, an admission he later recanted. An Italian tourist died in one of those blasts.
But instead of spiriting Posada off to Venezuela, the Bush administration is holding him in an immigration detention center. Rather than accuse him of being a terrorist, it simply has charged him with entering this country illegally.
Last year, an immigration judge ruled that Posada couldn't be deported to Venezuela or Cuba — countries the Bush administration considers rogue states — because he might be tortured. During an appearance on Telemundo, a Spanish-language TV station, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was asked whether this decision might affect the world's perception of the Bush administration's worldwide war on terrorism. "We try and intend to apply our standards uniformly, consistently," she said, "but these are issues that have to be decided in the right channels."
In fact, the Bush administration has contradictory standards — one for people who are thought to be enemies of this country, such as Arar, and another for Posada, an accused terrorist, who is the enemy of its enemies.
DeWayne Wickham writes weekly for USA TODAY.